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"All fiction is propaganda, and the fiction we like is the propaganda we believe in, and the fiction we don't like is the propaganda we don't believe in."
- Samuel R. Delany
 |
| Novel-Writing Machines | ||
| A device that automatically produces fiction. |
| Julia was twenty-six years old... and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor... She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the final product. She "didn't much care for reading," she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces. |
| Technovelgy from 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four),
by George Orwell. Published by Secker & Warburg in 1948 Additional resources -
|
I should also point out this classic cartoon from 1923, introducing the Cartoon Dynamo:
(The Cartoon Dynamo)
Compare to the knowledge engine from Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, the rthetorizer from The Penultimate Truth (1964) by Philip K. Dick, the electronic bard from The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age (1965) and the verse transcriber from Studio 5, The Stars (1971) by J.G. Ballard.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four)
More Ideas
and Technology by George Orwell
Tech news articles related to 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four)
Tech news articles related to works by George Orwell
Novel-Writing Machines-related
news articles:
- What-If Machine Concocts Creative Premises
- SciFiQ Science Fiction Writing Aid
- Orwell's Nightmare Of AI-Written Novels Comes To Pass
| Switzerland May Cap Population At Ten Million |
| California Governor Candidate Calls For Voting By Phone |
| Chinese Hospital Tries Vonnegut's 'Harrison Bergeron' Cosplay |
| A Remarkable Coincidence |
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'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
